Nobody in Doug Palmer's poem says plainly what has happened, and the gaps are where the poem lives. A speaker moves through a "we," a "you," a "Woman" and finally something called only "this," and ends by insisting, twice, "I can take" it. We have to work out what "it" is from hints. The poem seems to be about a hard, perhaps painful intimacy, and about the stubborn pride of someone who will not flinch from it.
The opening lines set a tone of exhausted honesty. "Now we stopped looking / to be excused" can be read two ways: the couple, or group, no longer seek forgiveness, or they no longer look away in order to avoid blame. Either way, a pretence has ended. "You / have said it" then lands like a verdict, and the break after "You" leaves that word briefly alone, pointed like a finger. The pronouns keep shifting, from "we" to "you" to "I," as if the speaker's closeness to the other person is dissolving line by line, leaving him alone with his own endurance.
The middle of the poem is its most vivid and most puzzling stretch. "You who shrug / the flesh, for / all it's worth" suggests someone who throws off the body like a coat, or treats it as cheap, and the idiom "for all it's worth" can sound either dismissive or desperate. Then comes "Woman: stroked / to a fine / cross-hatched plan." The colon turns her into a label, almost a caption. "Stroked" can mean caressed or drawn with a pen, and cross-hatching is a way of building shadow with crossing lines. Judging by the imagery, she is being both touched and rendered, made into a design, a grid of lines. The speaker seems to see her as a pattern more than a person, or to see how someone has reduced her to one. The thread imagery extends this: "The guts of it! / to take each / thread and loose it." "Guts" means both courage and insides, so the exclamation admires nerve and recoils from rawness at once. To "loose" a thread is to unravel a weave, and the poem leaves it open whether this is liberation or destruction.
After that tangle, the language turns physical. "I can take / the grabbing vines / and slapping branches" brings in the outdoors, as if the speaker were pushing through undergrowth. The vines "grab" and the branches "slap," so nature becomes a set of hostile hands, a fitting echo of the human grabbing implied earlier. Then the poem stops short: "But this!" The exclamation mark carries all the weight, and "this" is never defined. The ending repeats the earlier phrase with a small, telling shift: "I can take / that too." The speaker moves from "this" to "that," from near to far. It is hard to tell whether that is real strength, a performance of strength, or a sad lowering of expectations. The flat, short last line can be read as stoic, defiant or merely resigned, and the poem declines to choose.
Rhyme is absent, and the lines are very short, often two to four words, so the rhythm is jerky and breathless. Line breaks fall in awkward places ("for / all it's worth," "stroked / to a fine / cross-hatched plan"), which makes the reader hesitate and hear each phrase twice, once at the break and once in the full sentence. The title points to William Carlos Williams, whose plain speech and sharply cut lines are well known, and Palmer's compression seems to borrow that manner, though the poem itself gives no more than that hint.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It conveys intense feeling, whether desire, blame, fear or pride, without ever naming its cause, and it lets repeated phrasing and odd line breaks do the work of explanation. The reader ends up doing what the speaker does, pushing through an unclear tangle and deciding what can be taken.